Episode 62: Mark McCormick - Content strategy and the customer experience

Kristina Halvorson:

Your photo is so amazing. You look like a retired yoga teacher or a guy who's teaching yoga in retirement, I should say.

Mark McCormick:

That was a good day. In India no less.

Kristina Halvorson:

In India?

Mark McCormick:

Yeah. Yeah, that was a good pilgrimage.

Kristina Halvorson:

You had a pilgrimage even. Oh, that is a whole different podcast episode. That's a whole different podcast. Yeah. Exactly. Maybe I should change this over. Who wants to talk about content strategy anyway? I mean, really. Okay. 

All right. So what happens is I will introduce the podcast and introduce myself, and then I will introduce you. And once I say, hi, Mark, welcome to the podcast then we can start.

Mark McCormick:

Sounds good.

Kristina Halvorson:

That sound good? Okay.

Mark McCormick:

Yep.

Kristina Halvorson:

Okay. Here we go.

Hello once again and welcome to The Content Strategy Podcast. I am your host, Kristina Halvorson. I have an extraordinary human being I'm not going to lie to you on today's podcast. I'm going to tell you all about him and then I'm going to let him tell you more about himself. I would like you all to please meet Mr. Mark McCormick. Mark is a retired customer experience leader living in San Francisco, California. Mark spent 20 years at Wells Fargo where he landed as Senior Vice President of Customer Experience. He managed large teams working on online and mobile banking, but his legacy there was more likely sealed with two late career projects. The Simplicity Project and Operation Empathy. Mark now teaches yoga, writes and has an executive coaching practice. Mark, welcome to The Content Strategy Podcast.

Mark McCormick:

Hi Kristina. Thank you so much. I'm really thrilled to be here.

Kristina Halvorson:

I am super thrilled to have you here and I can't wait. We're not going to do it upfront, but I can't wait for the reveal about how we met and the role that you have played in the history and legacy of the discipline of content strategy. But first, a thing that I ask all of my guests right up top is that they share with me their journey through their career, in your case, landing as Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Wells Fargo. Fancy Pants. I think that you wanted to start a little bit back at the beginning, so why don't you kick that off for us?

Mark McCormick:

Oh, gosh. Thanks Kristina. Yeah. We talked earlier about when did this all start, this content strategy journey, and I said, to be really honest, I had to go all the way back to high school. I know, so give me a moment and I promise I'll get up to date quickly. But when I was in high school, I joined the yearbook team as a junior in high school, and I think I became copy editor chief or something like that. And then in my senior year I was editor-in-chief. I'd spent so much time on copy and I was already thinking I was going to be an English major, and I just cared about the copy, whereas everybody else seemed to care about print or photos and design. Which I did care about those things too, a lot, but I put a lot of thought and effort into content.

And then I went on to become an English major and I worked through college working in bookstores and then managing bookstores. And then I was managing bookstores and I realized I wanted to be closer to the way books were made and so I landed a job in publishing. I wanted to be an editor, an agent, and I wanted to work in fiction, but what I got was a job working in sales and then eventually editorial in academic publishing for a textbook publisher called Addison Wesley Benjamin Cummings. I'm very old, so this is the '80s we're talking about. But late in my career there, the idea of new media was just starting and the state of the art ... And you have to go to the Museum of Technology to see one of these. The state of the art was an interactive laser disc, and that will looked like a giant CD-Rom that you plugged into this player and it whirled around and you could punch in numbers and it was the first hypertext in a way.

And then you could go to different sections of the CD-ROM. And I worked with a team and we produced a CD-Rom. I was a nursing editor and we produced a CD-ROM called Infection Prevention and Control for Nurses. And that went on to win some awards. And at the awards conference ceremony in New Orleans, I met a guy named Robert May who had a company called Iconic Interactive in San Francisco. So I went all the way to New Orleans to meet somebody from San Francisco where I was already living, and I convinced him to give me a job. I was so excited by what I saw. And he said, "Well, I can give you a job for a few months as a producer on a couple of projects, but that's all I can guarantee." So I left my career of six years in academic publishing to go work for him.

And this is when it all started because I immediately noticed that this new media ... And at that time, state-of-the-art, had advanced to CD-ROMs and I was working on a project for Inc Magazine on how to do your own small business plan and things like that. How to create your marketing plan. And I was just noticing that in this new media, people were thinking about content last. So remember, I go all the way back to bookstores, to publishing, and I was like, "Wait a minute, we're just going to copy and paste in the content?" And the answer was yes, because the industry was enthralled with technology and to some degree design. Content was definitely an afterthought. I was appalled by this, and I realized that what we had was a whole new content information delivery system, and we needed to actually think about content first, not second or third or last.

Kristina Halvorson:

And I'm sorry. What year was this again?

Mark McCormick:

I started working at Iconic Interactive in 1993.

Kristina Halvorson:

Okay. So 30 years ago. All right. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Mark McCormick:

Yeah. Thanks. And so I started thinking about content and started thinking about content in a strategic way as a strategic asset, and that will become a theme on our conversation today. And I started developing an approach to thinking about content first. And I had a good group of people. They were a great team, and they were sympathetic designers and technologists, and they were all like, "Yeah, we get it. We don't want to just copy and paste in the content, so how are we going to do this?" And so then I started articulating my thoughts about what I called content development at the time, and then it became content strategy. But that gets you up to date or that gets you to the early days anyway, and now we can talk about what happened after that and the white paper and everything else.

Kristina Halvorson:

The reason I interrupted you to ask what year that was is that what you were describing is actually what people complain about in content strategy and content design every single day in 2023. So once we get to the other side of why you and I met in the first place, I'm going to want to talk about that a little bit because it is stunning and also hilarious to me that this remains a challenge in the field of technology and experience design. And I know you and I have plenty of thoughts about why that is. But before we talk about that, let's talk about this watershed activity/idea that you participated in and spearheaded in the late '90s.

Mark McCormick:

Okay. Okay. You mean the white paper?

Kristina Halvorson:

I do mean the white paper.

Mark McCormick:

The apocryphal white paper.

Kristina Halvorson:

Let's talk about the white paper. Yes, the apocryphal white paper that not enough people know about, but that we're going to change that here pretty soon.

Mark McCormick:

Right. Yes. Thank you. And I'm so glad we're finally talking about this and that it's going to find a home with you, Kristina, because there's no one I trust with this more than you. So the way this happened was I started writing down thoughts about this. And I went to Robert May as well, and I said ... By that time, CD-ROM was still happening, but the web hit during that period of time. The internet hit as a business platform and a business model, and businesses from all over the world were flocking to San Francisco to get their projects done. And we were doing work for Boeing, for Disney, The Wall Street Journal. The very first interactive edition of The Wall Street Journal called The Personal Journal I was a producer on, and it was done for Palm Pilot. That was the platform.

You think about Disney, think about The Wall Street Journal. These are content rich companies. Content is their business. And I went to Robert May and I said, "I do believe that if we could articulate this idea of content strategy, it would be a strategic advantage over other consulting companies who are going after the same business." And I said, "I think we could call it content development." And later a person who will remain nameless for reasons I'll explain in a moment, said, "No, it should be called content strategy." And he's like, "Great. Fantastic." He was up for anything that could be a competitive advantage. And so I said, "Well, I'm going to articulate what I mean by this so that we can show it to potential customers, and I'm going to write a white paper." White papers were big in those days. The points of view. And he said, "Go for it."

And so I spent really months, maybe even a couple of years ... I looked back, I have metadata on early drafts of this that take it all the way back to about 1996 when we really started writing things down. Now, there was one person and I've asked her if I could use her name, and she said, "No, Mark." Because she works for a company now where she'd have to go to their PR department and get permission to use her name. She helped me with early drafts and her main contribution was, I was calling it content development and she goes, "That's not sexy. You need to call it content strategy." So in the very first paragraph of what became called the Unified Theory of Content Development For The Web, the very first paragraph, the first page, you'll see that we call it content strategy.

And so we wrote it and wrote it and wrote it, and then it became more and more and more defined and it grew and grew and grew because we realized we were also creating a cookbook or a recipe book or a guide. No one had ever articulated the roles and what the roles could be in content strategy as well as a process. There was a lot of process definition going on at that time. Sara Ortloff Khoury and different people, we were writing a lot of process documents, but no one had really done that for content strategy specifically. Yeah. And so we wrote it and it helped us get customers, but more importantly, it became a field guide or a field manual for content strategists themselves so that they could articulate and execute on an approach that was repeatable and executable and efficient and all of that.

Kristina Halvorson:

So tell me changes then that you saw in your relationships with your clients at that time.

Mark McCormick:

Well, I think the main thing was that they saw that we took content seriously and that their content would be protected and cared for and more importantly, that it could be seen as a strategic asset. And so again, the intellectual property of some of these companies was their content. And so they were glad that somebody was taking seriously the idea that content ... Well, the slogan we came up with was content drives form, not the other way around. And we would say that in pitch meetings, we would say that to clients and they would come alive. Content drives form, not the other way around. What does that mean? That means that how we think about content and the affordances to the content, the primacy of content, the structure of content, the relative importance of this content versus that content, that would drive the form of the experience, not the experience first, and then, well, whatever content supports that. Like the medium drives the message, but in a more practical way. Does that make sense?

Kristina Halvorson:

Oh, my heart is racing. Yeah, it makes sense. You know you're preaching to the choir right here. Absolutely. And of course to all of our listeners as well, their hearts are also racing collectively.

Mark McCormick:

Thanks. We made T-shirts, Kristina. They're somewhere. I've got one somewhere. Content drives form and then on the back it said not the other way around.

Kristina Halvorson:

You have a T-shirt?

Mark McCormick:

Yes, we made T-shirts.

Kristina Halvorson:

All right. You've got to dig that out and model it and we'll put that photo in the show notes. Please tell me that will happen.

Mark McCormick:

I don't know if I can find that, but I'll try.

Kristina Halvorson:

Oh, gosh. Well maybe I'll make some new ones. That's incredible. Okay. So let's fast-forward then to your career at Wells Fargo because I think that having you land at a major or enterprise organization with this fundamental appreciation for content as a business asset, that was a rarity even at that time. Frankly, it still is now, believe it or not. But talk to me about the journey that you had because you were the first person calling yourself a content strategist at Wells Fargo. Is that right or did you come to the table with other folks?

Mark McCormick:

Oh no, not by Wells Fargo. There was an interim. Iconic Interactive ... I don't know if you remember, the late '90s was a period of a lot of mergers and acquisitions in the internet consulting space.

Kristina Halvorson:

Oh, I was still trying to figure out theater at that time. I came to the internet late.

Mark McCormick:

Oh, that's okay. Well, it was a crazy time. It was a wild time because companies were buying companies and merging and that kind of thing because the business was ... It was just booming. It was one of the big business booms in San Francisco. This is a boom and bust town, and that was a big boom. So it was fiercely competitive to get any talent at all. I had two or three different offers on the table about midway through my career at Iconic Interactive to go with bigger firms that started springing up. And Iconic got acquired by US Web, and then US Web got acquired by ... I want to say Sapient. I'm not really sure. That's when I left and I joined Scient. So it was Scient and the Studio Archetype and Razorfish and Organic and Sapient I think. Anyway, they were like the big five of these internet consulting companies. 

So when I went to Scient and I was there for two or three years and I was a managing director of content strategy, by that time, different companies were starting ... Because then people from Iconic US Web went other places and were starting their content strategy groups. And so we had a very robust content strategy group at Scient where I was for two and a half years before Wells Fargo. And I went from being managing director of content strategy there to being managing director of customer experience and not the only one. There were several of those.

And this is one of the main points I want to make today. That's where I proved that content strategy leaders could be customer experience leaders and I really want to emphasize that point. Because then most customer experience leaders up to that point ... And we still see this, but most were from design backgrounds. I got really tired of hearing design leaders saying they had classical design training, classical design background. Which it's great, that's nice, but it didn't have to have that to be a customer experience leader, especially as I said, if you considered the primacy of content and that it was just as important as in those days, information architecture, user experience design, visual design.

So then two and a half years. And then the big dot bomb happened. And then for eight months or so, everybody in this town was unemployed. And then after riding that wild ride through Iconic and Scient and building teams and building bigger and bigger and bigger teams from teams with a few people or a dozen people to hundreds and hundreds of people and everything crashed to the ground. And then eventually I was seeking security, and then I went to Wells Fargo. And right away at Wells Fargo I was managing a small customer experience team, a group. I think maybe it was content strategists and information architects. And then quickly I got promoted to managing a customer experience team and then that was the end of the pure content strategy part of my career, if that makes sense. Then I was just managing customer experience teams.

Kristina Halvorson:

Let's take a couple of steps back if we can. Because something that you said really, really resonates, which is that you were able to prove out the fact that someone who was primarily focused in content and content strategy could transition into customer experience leadership. How did you make the case for that? What happened? Who did you have to influence? What did you have to demonstrate? Talk to me a little bit about that process.

Mark McCormick:

Yeah. So when I was working with Sara Ortloff Khoury, Sara Ortloff at the time, at Iconic and with some other super talented front-end developers, visual designers, information architects and user experience folks, and we were all codifying and articulating customer experience process in general, that's when the light bulb came on that the leader of the customer experience function could come from any one of those disciplines. It just meant that you had to understand all of the disciplines and how they interacted with each other. And that was the big breakthrough. It's funny because we wouldn't say to a person with a design background who was heading a customer experience team, "Well, what are your content strategy credentials?" But we say to content strategy leaders who are managing a customer experience team, "What are your design credentials?" You know what I'm saying? So the truth is that you needed to be a generalist about all of them. Now, I did almost minor in art in college. I felt like I had credibility with designers because ... Even now I paint and I draw. I was very passionate about design as well, and I think that that helped. But most importantly, you had to be able to be ... I guess it goes all the way back to being an editor of the yearbook. You had to be able to orchestrate all the specialty functions, if that makes sense.

Kristina Halvorson:

So when you were then at Wells Fargo, you stepped in and took over management of this small team of content strategists and then advanced very quickly in your career there. When you were senior vice president, can you estimate or remember how many content strategists you all had functioning on a team?

Mark McCormick:

Yeah. Well, that was a while ago when I was managing the retail side of that. So I'm going to say at its peak and spread across retail and wholesale at least ... And then there were other teams too. I've got to say 40, 50, upwards of 100 spread across all teams.

Kristina Halvorson:

That's a lot of content strategists. And a challenge that folks have even today ... I'm sitting here smirking because everything that you're talking about are conversations that people have every single day today in 2023, which I'm not sure if people are laughing or sobbing right now or both. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about amongst your peers, as you gained more influence and were promoted through the ranks at Wells Fargo, how were you able to continually sponsor and champion and demonstrate the value and importance of content strategy with your other experience design peers?

Mark McCormick:

Well, I had super supportive leadership, Satcha Watson who hired me. She got it. She was from a business background. Nancy Dickinson at Scient. It wasn't that hard ultimately because I think the main thing was making sure that the content strategists saw themself as professionals, peers, to all of the other design professionals, and then arming them with the right tools and techniques and approaches so that they could be taken seriously and they had a lot of credibility. So I was super selective, and we should talk about this, in the hiring process for content strategists. I think over time people just got it.

And there's a lot of content on the Wells Fargo websites. A lot of deep content on financial planning, on retirement, on insurance, on all kinds of financial topics. And so it didn't take very much convincing with our business partners, very much convincing to help them understand that the content was just as important as anything. So I think it was a lot to do with hiring the right people and giving them the tools and techniques.

Kristina Halvorson:

One of the things that we have chatted about is your process of interviewing content strategists who are applying to work with you. Can you talk about that just a little bit?

Mark McCormick:

Yes. Oh my gosh, I'm so glad you brought that up because I really do want to talk about that. So after I articulated the roles of the content strategist in the white paper as well as the processes of a content strategist in the white paper, and then started thinking about that more deeply, and then also when you started writing, Kristina, and you started building frameworks, after I realized that there were frameworks for how a person could talk about content strategy, I started expecting that from content strategy candidates that came through. So one of the questions that I would ask content strategy candidates is for them to articulate what content strategy was. And it was important to me that they had been thoughtful about a process because I knew that they were going to get asked that question by their business partners or by clients when they were sitting in the room at kickoffs and during the phases of the project, well, what is content strategy? What are you going to do for me?

And it was very important to me that they could articulate some process. And so I would actually warn the content strategy candidates coming in a lot of times like, "I'm going to ask you this question, so I hope that you will have an answer." And all I wanted them was to come in with some sort of answer. I wanted them to articulate a process. And one of the processes that I started explaining to people they could use is like this who ... This is different than the process described in the white paper, but was a who, what, where, why, how, and how much of content strategy. So content strategy would consider who is going to create the content? What is the content going to be? Where is it going to live? How is it going to be organized?

Why was a big question. Why are we creating this content? How is it going to support the brand? Where is it going to live in content management systems and that sort of thing? How was it going to get created? Were we going to syndicate it? Were we going to create it ourselves? Were we going to license it? What were we going to do? And how much of each type of content was there going to be? So that's a journalistic model. They look at who, why, how, and how much in writing stories, but applied to content strategy, it asks different questions, but it was at least a framework. And then you came along with your framework, which I respected very much. So then I was like, well, there's a couple different frameworks out there. Anyway, so that became my technique or the way I would think about interviewing content strategists.

Kristina Halvorson:

And I think that that's still so legitimate, and I think that frankly every, I think content strategist should be asked at this time because we've seen such a ... I think this is a real era of claiming all of the different specializations in fields of practice within this larger discipline of content strategy, which I know is a little bit academic, but I think it's the easiest way to look at it. We at Brain Traffic have really started talking about web content strategy for websites and enterprise content strategy, which is orchestrating and synthesizing processes and standards across an enterprise, in particular an organization. We have the evolution of content design, which is largely focused in product and product design. We have content engineering, which is largely looking at how we structure content for management reuse, personalization, et cetera, across different channels and platforms.

So I think it's so critically important now more than ever to really recognize those different areas of specialization so that we can continue to understand how they work together and how we depend on one another and how important it is for us each to be able to have, like you said, those informed conversations with our peers in all of these different parts of an organization. So I really appreciate that you hit home on content strategists coming through the door. Talk to me about how you talk about your practice, because you're not only going to be expected to show your work, but you're also going to be expected to speak coherently about your activities and how and where they add value within the organization.

Mark McCormick:

And I will say that's your great contribution, Kristina. What you just described about those areas of specialization, I think that's super relevant and that's beyond what I did. And that's because the discipline, largely because of your great work with your conferences and your books, because you were able to take it to the next level. So kudos to you and to all of the people who have been working to define those specializations because yes, we need to be able to talk about it. And back before we had specializations, and when you came to ... I'll never forget the day you came to my office and interviewed me and you were working on your great model, which was workflow governance, structure, and substance, as I recall. The people components, the content components. When I discovered that, then I would start putting that in front of content strategists and I'd say, "Here's another great model. Just be sure you can articulate a model and an approach for content strategy." And I believe that, yeah, like you're saying, have to be able to articulate your specialty and you have to be able to articulate your approach.

Kristina Halvorson:

Well, I want to say thank you for all of the kind words that you're saying about my work, and I want to say definitively that a lot of my work was simply curating and synthesizing the work of so many others before me. Gerry McGovern was talking about content and content strategy in the late '90s. Ann Rockley came to us with her book, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Theory of Content Strategy. And I always screw up the subtitle. And then Karen McGrane was talking about content strategy and doing that at her work at what became Razorfish.

And so really the 2008, 2009 timeframe, which is when I, and let's be real, I sort of stalked you and flew myself out to San Francisco to interview you and a couple of other folks. That was all really just curating and sleuthing and figuring out the smart, useful, incredibly groundbreaking things that people had been talking about for a decade, and that you had been so early to yourself synthesize and codify what this practice was. And then over the years, a lot of my work has been hosting these conferences and getting people on this podcast to be able to lift up their work. And that is, I think what has truly helped the field to evolve is the many, many, many folks who have shared their work over the years. So thank you and it wasn't just me. There were a lot of people involved.

Mark McCormick:

I understand. Well, that's what a good content strategist does, right? Synthesis is one of the functions that I talk about in the white paper as being a primary function of content strategy so you were doing that.

Kristina Halvorson:

Well, and do you want to talk through a little bit about the major sections of the white paper? Which again, let me be clear. When I got ahold of that, and to this day, I can't even remember exactly how it fell into my hands. Somebody sent me the PDF. I'm pretty sure it was somehow through-

Mark McCormick:

No.

Kristina Halvorson:

Oh, do you remember?

Mark McCormick:

I think I gave it to you. I mean, I think I gave you a copy. I thought I did in the office that day. I mean, I pulled it off my shelf, blew off the dust, and I said-

Kristina Halvorson:

Oh my gosh.

Mark McCormick:

I think that I gave it to you.

Kristina Halvorson:

Well, I know Karen McGrane pointed me in your direction because she had connected with you somehow, and I knew that you had really led the integration of content strategy throughout the enterprise of Wells Fargo, and you were really the only executive level human being that I had come across who had that really robust function across the enterprise and that is why I was so excited to talk to you. So yeah, when I got a hold of that paper, it was like reading everything that I had been trying to sort of piece together in my head through all of these different conversations. And truly, there were two people who had been able to really speak about it as articulately and comprehensively, and one of them was Karen McGrane, and the other one was Melissa Rach, who helped me a lot with the first edition and then co-authored the second edition with me. So reading that white paper was just a blinding light of insight and understanding, and I was really worked up and I read it a lot. So why don't you talk through a little bit what is in that white paper.

Mark McCormick:

Yeah. And I'll do it briefly because I'm thrilled that I think you've offered to finally we'll find a home on content strategy.com and we'll let people, I guess, download the PDF. Is that what we'll do?

Kristina Halvorson:

It is up to you, but I am sure people would love to have that in their hands because even though it's 25 years old, it's so relevant and useful to address so many of the questions and concerns and problems and language around the value of content and the complexity of getting content right today.

Mark McCormick:

Yeah, and I think it's good that we're putting it out there and that I talk about it for just a moment because the couple of times when there have been conversations online on various forums about the origins of content strategy, and people will say, "Well, apparently Mark McCormick wrote this paper in the late '90s, whatever." But then people say, "Well, we were doing that at HP in the early '90s, but it was a lot of technical content management system stuff, and it was a lot of technical ..." Anyway, I really distinguished content strategy from content management, the technical aspects of content management. In fact, I don't even cover ... I cover it a little bit in the white paper, but there are people who were doing some things that they might've called content strategy earlier, and I just want to make sure that we say that because people, when you talk about origins of things and who was there and who was in the room when it happened and all of that kind of stuff, people get their ire up a little bit.

So just wanted to acknowledge that there were other pioneers as well doing other similar things. But in the white paper, really quickly, it had four major sections. It had an executive summary just arguing for the primacy of content. Then the second section was the roles of the content strategist and I broke those down into these major roles. To advocate, to envision, to consult, to strategize, to design, to edit, and to document. So I saw the content strategy playing those different roles. Each of those could come with their own process points. But the main process points that I then outlined for content strategy were analyze, organize, define, and synthesize. And within the synthesize process was writing navitorial nomenclature and that sort of thing. And then there were some appendices. So that's the main outline for the white paper and so you'll be able to see that.

And I wanted to say too, quickly, that when we published this, every one of those sections had a lot of links, and I finally just this morning, made the decision to go through and take out all the links because they were just dead. If you looked at these links, they were like looking at the history of the internet. I don't even think MySpace was around yet, but to Yahoo, early Yahoo pages and personal wealth and different things that just don't even exist anymore. So I just wanted to say really quickly that that was the main outline of the white paper, but that links have all been taken out.

Kristina Halvorson:

Ironically, if people had some degree of content strategy active, those links would not be rotting out there. They'd redirect to somewhere. I'm just saying, I'm just suggesting that if people had had the foresight and read your paper, they would've known better. So I know that you have been out of the workforce at Wells Fargo now for years, but from your final years there, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about from an experienced leader standpoint, what were some of the strengths and challenges that you saw, especially after the advent of mobile apps and the explosion of social media in the late 2000s, early teens, because content strategy shifted and changed and had to evolve at that time. So talk to me a little bit about how you saw the practice evolve at Wells Fargo in your last years there.

Mark McCormick:

Well, I think things got, as you signaled there, incredibly complex in a multi-platform environment and designing for many different environments all the time and content management got very, very complicated as well. What would stay? And I envisioned this in the white paper, what would be the dynamic content rates and things like that, amortization schedules, all those kinds of things that were super complicated. And then the affordances to content that had to become incredibly interactive. We didn't deal with that in the early, early days. And then just in general, I do think that there's one thing that will never change, that if anything just got increasingly complex about customer experience in general through all of my years at Wells Fargo and I don't think this will change and I've come to understand it as a kind of a church and state or three branches of the government sort of situation, which is that business and technology and experience will always live in constant tension with each other.

And that tension is natural. That everyone is going to be advocating business, people will be advocating for their business goals, experience people will be advocating for the elegance of experience. Excuse me. And technical people will be thinking about the technological lift to do anything to realize these big dreams and aspirations that the other two areas have. So I don't think that that will ever change and I think that people who work in customer experience, whether it's content or interaction design or visual design, any of those just have to accept that as being that's what they're there for. That's why it's called work.

Kristina Halvorson:

Well, and what's interesting is that when we talk about enterprise content strategy ... And granted, different people talk about it in different ways, and I think of it almost more as leaning towards a content operations function where content strategy and strategic consideration of content as a business asset might live at some point. In my fantasy, here's how things should be. But the common asset between those three entities, the business, technology and experience design is content. That is the thing that all three of those entities share and have to manage and they request and they structure it and they design it and they create it and they govern it over time. And so who better than the content strategist to continue to show curiosity and literacy across those three entities and continually talk about shared goals, shared aspirations, shared principles around the content that they are prioritizing, that they are serving to their audiences where, when, how, why all of the outstanding questions that you asked and articulated. And that to me is the end goal of where content strategy can and should sit when it comes to content and communication and information in particular. And so I think that the opportunity for a wide variety of content professionals to continually, if not ease the tension, then at least help people connect the dots between those three things is just profound and limitless now and in the years to come.

Mark McCormick:

Yeah. Well, I nominate you for president. I agree with you.

Kristina Halvorson:

People keep nominating me for stuff. I'm going to retire. I'm tired. I don't want to do anything else. I just want to have my podcast and make other people do things.

Mark McCormick:

Well, it's well articulated and I think it brings me to the point that I want to make almost above all others is that content strategists need to see themselves as leaders. And that starts from within, right? You have to see yourself as a leader. You have a seat at the table that the content is the glue, is the connective glue between all of these different functions. Yeah. It's funny that when you're talking and just this thread of the conversation makes me think about that time at South by Southwest when we were on that panel. Do you remember that?

Kristina Halvorson:

I do.

Mark McCormick:

It was you and me and Karen McGrane, and do you remember who else was on the panel?

Kristina Halvorson:

I certainly do not.

Mark McCormick:

It was just at-

Kristina Halvorson:

I sat on too many panels in South by Southwest. It all blurs together for me.

Mark McCormick:

Yeah. Well, that was my one and only, and I was so delighted to be there. And I think at that time I was working at Wells Fargo and was managing a customer experience team. But again, it had my humble roots in content strategy and it had been trying to define it. And so you invited me and you talked about that you interviewed me before the book and that kind of thing. And I will never forget this. There was a Q&A section and somebody raised their hand and asked the question of me. They said, "Mark, do you ..." I think they said, "Do you write tags?" Remember when tags were the thing? And it was like, do you write your own tag metadata? Do you do your own metadata? And I said, "No, I don't. I have staff for that." And a big groan came up from the audience. Do you remember this?

Kristina Halvorson:

No. And I just say that but I don't remember what I had for breakfast.

Mark McCormick:

It was one of those things that it hit me so hard because I was like, oh my God, I'm going to get booed off the stage. Because they're like, "Who is this guy? I have staff for that." But I said that. I know it sounded arrogant and it sounded flip, but I was able to come back and say, "What I'm trying to say is that if you see yourself as a content strategist, as somebody whose job is to write metadata and tagging, you will never rise to the level of leadership that you can. You will never fulfill your true potential as a customer experience leader." Because that's what I was trying to say is that you have as much right to be a leader of the customer experience function as anyone. And so I was trying to elevate people's perceptions of the content strategy role. And I still believe that, and if anything, I'm a living example that a poor kid from Idaho State with an English background can become a senior vice president at Wells Fargo of a large customer experience team because I believe that content was legitimate and I believed in the primacy of content. That's what I'm trying to say.

Kristina Halvorson:

I think that is the perfect note on which to wrap our conversation today. This has been so amazing and it's just an honor to have you here. I'm so grateful that we've been able to stay in touch over the last 15 years and hopefully for years to come. I wonder, tell me just briefly as we wrap things, what is it that you're doing now?

Mark McCormick:

Gosh. I retired two years ago, so the only thing that I do that is remotely professional in any way is I do have a executive coaching. I love coaching middle managers. So I have a small coaching practice and in addition, I am looking at a bunch of paintings that I just completed in a painting workshop in Provincetown and starting to sell some paintings. I'm teaching yoga. I'm writing. I've written a memoir that I'm now working on a novel so I am a busy retired person. That's basically what I'm doing.

Kristina Halvorson:

Yeah, that sounds nothing like retirement to me. That sounds like a new phase, a new chapter, and I admire that deeply.

Mark McCormick:

Thank you.

Kristina Halvorson:

I just think you're a great guy. So thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing your stories and your perspectives with our listeners. And I just want to be clear that rather than feel in despair, that the challenges and the opportunities that you are talking about from 25 years ago are still the same, I would just like to assure everybody what this means is that we will all have jobs forever. So thank you so much.

Mark McCormick:

Well, largely thanks to you and your work. This has been an absolute delight and I'm thrilled that the paper's going to find its home on contentstrategy.com so watch for that too.

Kristina Halvorson:

We're honored to be able to host it there. Thanks so much, Mark.

Mark McCormick:

Thanks Kristina. Bye for now.

Kristina Halvorson:
Thanks so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Content Strategy Podcast. Our podcast is brought to you by Brain Traffic, a content strategy services and events company. It’s produced by Robert Mills with editing from Bare Value. Our transcripts are from REV.com. You can find all kinds of episodes at contentstrategy.com and you can learn more about Brain Traffic at braintraffic.com. See you soon.